


James Copley's No Good Very Bad Year

by Amuly



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol, Epistolary, Humor, Joe POV, M/M, Post-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, barely, it's just joe smoking hash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 11:13:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30088227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amuly/pseuds/Amuly
Summary: Copley has a very simple directive: wipe out all evidence of the Old Guard and their activities throughout history. The problem is, the people best suited to direct him where to look are a group of immortals who don't like being given homework assignments from a man who was responsible for their capture.Oh, and then there's the matter of that sex tape.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 64
Kudos: 304





	James Copley's No Good Very Bad Year

_Photo: 1853, Crimea. Joe and Nicky. Croat laborers. Joe and Nicky (sitting, kneeling) alongside[…]_

_Photo: 1853, Crimea. Joe, in uniform. British officer's uniform[…]_

“We need to go through everything I have on you and figure out what else might be out there,” Copley was explaining.

Joe was half-listening. He was pacing around Copley’s home office while he half-listened, tossing a paperweight back and forth between his hands as he examined the files and photos of them, then the office itself, the property, surrounding woods. Copley had done suspiciously well for himself in a civil service job. It could have been thanks to his wife’s occupation, but even still, the medical bills associated with ALS were astronomical, so Joe had heard, somewhere.

“It will take weeks—maybe even months. Depends how much you can give me, and how much else is out there—”

“No.”

Joe turned at Nicky’s quiet but firm response. He was standing in front of Copley’s wall, getting a more careful look at the centuries of history Copley had dug up on them all. When Copley fell silent, Nicky glanced over his shoulder. He met Joe’s eyes first, of course, and Joe saw, and understood. He nodded, and Nicky focused his attention on Copley, who was standing behind his desk and staring at Nicky in shock. After a long moment Copley finally asked:

“No?”

“We won’t spend months with you, James,” Nicky told him in that same even, firm tone. “We have too much to do, and we have lives, beside. Our job, and our time, are not beholden to your schedules.”

Of course, Copley looked at Joe, with an expression like he expected Joe to confirm that Nicky was being unreasonable. Joe lowered his eyebrows at Copley, still tossing that paperweight back and forth between his hands. After a moment Copley realized he wouldn’t be getting any help from Joe—Allah love the man for even trying—and he turned back to Nicky.

“You asked me to help you,” Copley reminded him. “This is part of that. If I put this together, someone else could. Most of this is public information—it’s not locked away in some CIA Top Secret file.”

“We understand,” Nicky said. He had already turned back to the wall, squinting and leaning this way and that as he looked at different items. “But we will help you on our time. Not yours.”

Copley’s lips parted, an unvoiced _ah_ falling from them as what Nicky meant finally hit home. Joe tossed the paperweight one more time, then strode forward to Copley’s desk and placed it on a stack of papers (that’s what it was for, after all, wasn’t it?).

“Ask us,” Joe told him. He nodded at Copley’s laptop. “We’re here. We’ve got no where to be until…” he turned to Nicky, pretending to consult with him.

“Dinner reservations at eight,” Nicky told him, smiling because he knew Joe knew, and this was just a performance. Joe wanted to blow him a kiss, but he settled for a wink. Best not to let on just how much of a soft touch he was in front of Copley just yet. He turned back to Copley.

“Six, then,” he said.

“Traffic, Joe.”

“Five,” Joe corrected himself. Then he smiled toothily at Copley.

Good man, he barely spent more than a few moments sweating over the sudden change in his moment. He grabbed at his computer, then the stack of papers Joe just set the paperweight down on. Then he went back to his laptop and grabbed it, carrying it around the desk to the board.

“Okay… Okay…” he said, sounding like he was talking himself into this, somehow. Joe watched him settle in front of his own board and fought a smirk at Copley’s flustered expression. For a CIA agent, the man was easily flustered. Must have been mostly a desk jockey—research, perhaps, judging by the room they were standing in right now.

Copley nodded to himself and pointed to a picture on the board, seemingly at random. But he cleared his throat and announced: “Crimea. Eighteen fifty-three. I have two photographs of the both of you and one of Andy…”

They spent some time pouring over the photos, trading stories about the war. Nicky grew irritated with it quickly, speaking less and less as the process dragged on. Joe could hardly blame him. They were private people, by necessity. For nine hundred years they had kept their secret, slipped into the shadows of history (sometimes more successfully than others), and now, here was this man who ordered them to lay their secrets bare, for their own good. It rubbed Joe the wrong way, and he was not nearly as private as Nicky.

“Do you remember where you traveled afterwards? Particular country? Or where you were before then? That would also be quite useful.”

“Eighteen fifty-three,” Joe mused, tilting his neck up to scratch under his chin. He squinted over at Nicky. “Crimea…”

“When was the American War?” Nicky asked. “Around then.”

“Eighteen sixty-one,” Copley supplied. “About a decade after.”

“We were in America beforehand too,” Joe thought. “Freeing slaves. Haiti- No. That was much earlier.”

“I have you in Haiti in nineteen hundred-”

Nicky shook his head. “Before then.”

“When?” Copley asked, pulling out his iPad.

“Oh, they did all the work,” Joe said. “Becoming free. We just helped who we could.”

Copley frowned. “You mean the Haitian revolution?” Joe shrugged at him. “That was the seventeen nineties.”

“Sure. Then.”

Copley shook his head and noted it down. “I suppose when it’s centuries and not just decades you forget the details.”

“We remember what’s important,” Nicky told him. “Maybe not dates, and names. But we remember people. Feelings. Food and laughter, and tears, too.” He looked over at Joe, those shadowed eyes filled with meaning Joe could read easier than print on a page, easier than words spoken aloud. Joe smiled at him, and the ghost of a smile echoed back at Joe, in Nicky’s subtle, understated way. “We remember our lives, much as anyone. A decade or century: we all forget the unimportant things, and hold close those treasured memories.”

Copley looked like he was going to say something to that—something cynical, maybe? But Joe raised an eyebrow at him and Copley wisely swallowed whatever words were on the tip of his tongue.

“I have another-” Copley started, pulling out a different file. But Nicky shook his head and nodded at Joe.

“I need to buy some groceries,” Nicky said, and Joe pushed off from where he was sitting on the arm of a chair, grabbing for his coat.

“I thought you were going out to dinner,” Copley commented, tone dry.

“For breakfast,” Nicky said back, utterly straight-faced. Joe had to suppress a snicker as Nicky met Copley’s eyes and waited for Copley to push back against their obvious lies. Copley’s mouth opened, an aborted incredulous huff just barely passing through his lips, before he pulled back and sighed.

“I look forward to working with you again. Soon.”

Nicky turned his back to Copley, shooting Joe a secretive little smile. “We will call you,” he said, accent thicker than strictly necessary. As they left together, Joe nudged his shoulder against Nicky’s.

“You’re a little shit, you know that?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t.”

Joe wrapped his arm around Nicky’s waist and tucked his hand into his back pocket, hugging Nicky close as the strolled out of Copley’s house together.

“I get the feeling he’s _going_ to, soon enough.”

* * *

_College ID: N. Smith, 1992-93, Spring Semester, ID #: 62773884, Birth Date: 4/8/1972_

Copley tossed the ID into the shredder after Nicky took a look at it and nodded.

“Were you an actual student at the college?” Copley asked. “Or was it just an ID for the moment?” When Nicky cocked his head at him, Copley elaborated: “Are there transcripts, yearbooks, a dissertation I have to track down…?”

“Oh, yes,” Nicky nodded, understanding now. “I was a student, yes. There may be records.”

“What were you studying?” Copley asked, frowning at him.

“Medicine.”

Copley’s eyebrows shot up. Nicky elaborated:

“I go back every few decades and learn the new techniques. Technologies.”

“But you can’t be hurt.”

“We hurt,” Joe shot back. Copley winced, and Joe wasn’t too big a man to take a little satisfaction in that. Good to remind Copley, that no matter how much they heal, no matter how long they lived, they were still _men_ : with nerves, and pains, and hearts. Copley had been in the lab with Dr. Kozak and Merrick. He had heard Nicky and Joe’s cries of pain and done _nothing_ (until Nile had done _something_ ). Copley needed to remember that: he had heard just how much Joe and Nicky could hurt. That they _could_ hurt.

“It’s not for us,” Nicky explained. He touched a hand to Joe’s, a _quiet, love. Quiet_. Joe fumed but sat back on the couch in Copley’s home office. “Where we go, the good we try to do: it is not all killing. We _help_ , James. And people, where we go: they often are in dire need of medical attention.”

“Nicky was a medic: in World War II, in Vietnam, Korea, Crimea, Afghanistan…” Joe continued, no small hint of pride in his voice. “We help people, Copley.”

Nicky smiled softly. “We do what we can. And so, I go to school, sometimes, and learn what is new.” He spread his hands out. “There is so much, now. I know it couldn’t save your wife, but medicine now is a miracle. The lives it has saved. The people it can heal. It is wonderful.”

Copley swallowed, looking down at his hands.

“It is,” he finally agreed after a long moment. There were tears in his eyes when he looked up. “It is. I… forget that, sometimes.”

“It is easy to forget,” Nicky agreed, kindly. Too kindly, Joe thought. But that was Nicky. That was the man Joe loved, more than anything. “But it is a magnificent age we live in, now. Infants: so many of them _live_. Mothers: childbirth is no longer so fraught, so terrifying. Vaccines, and anesthesia-”

“Anesthesia is a major miracle,” Joe agreed. He shot Copley a look. “No more giving someone a shot of liquor and hacking off their leg.”

Copley nodded, shamefaced. “I know-”

“You don’t,” Joe disagreed. Nicky shushed him.

“You’re right,” Copley agreed. “I don’t. But it is. A miracle.”

“There will be miracles more,” Nicky continued in that soft, understanding tone. “There are never enough. There is always regret, in the ones we cannot save. But every day: miracles more. And so, I go back to school, sometimes. To learn how to administer these miracles.”

Copley nodded, shamefaced. Then he nodded at his computer. “What are the names and dates of all the universities you’ve been to? As well as you can remember.”

Joe sat back as Nicky started to list them all, in roughly chronological order, moving backwards. He studied Copley’s face as Nicky talked.

The man was grieving his lost wife. Joe understood that. He did not forgive him—not as easily or selflessly as his Nicky had. But for now, at least, he understood.

* * *

_Passport: Name: Joseph Jones. Nationality: Dutch Gender: M Date of Birth: 02.01.1956 Passport Issued: 01.09.2014 Passport Expires: 31.08.2024_

Copley held the passport up to Joe, eyebrows raised. Joe looked at it, then back up at Copley. “Yes?”

“This is your most recent passport?”

Joe shrugged. “Well, I’ve got one on me, so it can’t be the _most_ recent.” Joe squinted at the issued date. “Must be pretty recent, though.”

“Who made this for you?”

Joe shrugged again and leaned back, glancing over at Nicky. Nicky shook his head and leaned forward, squinting at the passport himself. Counterbalance. Joe smiled at the side of his head and admired the little crinkles in the corners of his eyes.

“Not Booker. These were from one of Andy’s contacts. Balkans… no: Estonia.”

Copley sighed and rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Do either of you see the problem with this?”

“Well, _you_ have it,” Joe commented. “That’s why we’ve got you, isn’t it? So: burn it.”

“Date of birth, Mr. Al-Kaysani.”

Nicky realized before Joe did, snorting quietly to himself. Joe frowned at the date of birth and did the math in his head. “What year is it?” he asked out of the side of his mouth to Nicky.

“Twenty twenty-one.”

 _Ah_. “Ah.” Joe grinned up at Copley. “I suppose that’s a stretch.”

Nicky chuckled and nudged an arm into Joe’s. “You look magnificent for a man nearing seventy.”

“Well-preserved?”

“Like a mummy,” Nicky teased. Joe burst out laughing, leaning against Nicky and giving his arm a squeeze. Ah, how he loved this man.

Copley just sighed and tucked the passport back into the bag he brought with him. Then, from the same bag, he produced four new passports and slid them across the table.

“New passports. With more reasonable birth dates.”

Joe opened his and did the math. “Hey! I’m not thirty-eight!” He leaned over Nicky’s shoulder to try and get a peek at his. “You made Nicky _six_ years younger than me?!”

“Joe,” Nicky gentled. “We are nearly a thousand years old.”

“I’m thirty-three!” Joe protested.

“ _Anno di Cristi…_ ” Nicky sing-songed under his breath. Joe kicked him—lovingly, of course—under the table.

“Nicky is thirty!” Joe continued, unperturbed.

Copley rubbed his forehead again. The poor man: he would give himself wrinkles. More wrinkles. Joe grinned to himself at the thought that they would be the cause of more of Copley’s grey hairs. Poor man had no idea what he had signed up for, clearly.

“I’ll keep that in mind for the next passports. But thirty-eight is more believable than sixty-six. Or twenty, which was how old Nicky’s student ID had him as.”

Joe sniffed as Nicky scooped up the passports for all of them and tucked them into his own bag.

“Thank you,” Nicky said to Copley. Joe huffed and stood, Nicky following his lead.

When they left the little coffee shop Joe took Nicky’s hand in his, kissing at his knuckles. “My beauty: you look not a day over twenty-five.”

Nicky snorted as they strolled through the London streets. “You are a beautiful liar, my Joe.”

Joe waited. And waited. When Nicky said nothing more, Joe tugged at his hand, rubbing his thumb over the backs of his knuckles. “And I…”

Without hesitation, Nicky replied: “Look hardly a day over thirty-six. Thirty-seven, at most.”

Joe wailed at the most _grievous_ insult, and Nicky just grinned and continued walking straight ahead, Joe trailing pathetically after him (but still holding his hand). Joe would make Nicky _pay_ for that. Later.

* * *

_Photo: Cuba, 1956. Joe, Nicky, Booker pictured with Cuban revolutionaries. Nicky is smoking a cigar next to Joe. The men are in a loose circle, Booker across from Nicky and Joe. They are looking at Fidel Castro pointing at the ground, indicating a diagram._

_Research indicates this photo was taken just before the Granma landing. Joe Nicky and Booker involved? Did they escape to the Sierra Maestra mountains with the rest of the survivors?_

_Survivors of the Granma landing include Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos […]_

Andy snorted over the rim of her vodka and coke (hold the coke). Copley arched an eyebrow at her, waiting.

“Cuba was fun,” she finally settled on, enigmatically.

Joe grabbed for the photo with Nicky, holding it between them together as they bent their heads and grinned at themselves, however many decades ago (six? _Seven_? Surely it hadn’t been _that_ long ago… before they knew it, it’d be a century, _oh_ …). Joe elbowed Nicky.

“Do you remember-”

“The hotel,” Nicky cut him off, smiling. He looked up and met Joe’s eyes, a wicked glint in his. “I remember.”

“You _burned_ ,” Joe teased, leaning ever-so-closer to his beloved. Nicky leaned back, as he always did, the two of them swaying towards each other like sunflowers facing their sun. Only, they both were the sunflower, and both the sun, for each other.

Copley wasn’t paying them any mind. Instead he was interrogating Andy, asking her exactly what they got up to in ’56, where else they were, when, how many photos might be floating out there of them.

“The drinks were magnificent,” Joe continued, but he knew he was only speaking to Nicky.

In response, Nicky lifted his wineglass to Joe, swirling the cabernet around expertly in his palm. Joe watched with hungry eyes as Nicky took a long swallow, Adam’s apple bobbing tantalizingly. They would have to recreate some of that Cuban magic tonight, in their room. Where were they now? Juliett safehouse? Not much privacy in that one. Perhaps they could convince Andy to go “train” Nile somewhere for a few hours while he and Nicky “reminisced?”

“What would you know about the drinks?” Nicky teased him.

“I could taste them on your lips,” Joe reminded him. But then he smiled: “And they made me ones without alcohol. Do you remember? The frozen pineapple and then… what was it…”

“Coconut.”

Joe _ah’d_ silently, helplessly drowning in Nicky’s beautiful eyes. Their expensive dinner was probably getting cold, but now there was only one thing Joe was hungry for.

“Joe?”

Blinking, Joe shook himself out of his daydreaming and turned, looking for… oh. Copley. Right: they had business to take care of. Sighing, Joe focused back on the business at hand.

Under the table, Nicky’s foot knocked gently into his. Joe smiled. Thank goodness it was never all work, when the work could be done alongside his heart.

“Yes, sorry. What else do you need?”

“Do you have hotel names, specific cities on specific dates, anything like that?”

“What was the hotel with the pool with the…” Joe waved his fingers vaguely at Nicky. “Remember?”

“The mosaic?”

“No, the other one. Oh, but we should tell him that one, too.”

“The one where you shaved?”

“The one where I put sunblock on your back and that boy tried to flirt with you.”

“Oh!” Nicky smiled. “The one with the… ah, _come se dici… scivolo_?”

“Water slide!” Joe translated, snapping his fingers. “Yes! That one?”

“Hotel Nacional?” Nicky mused.

“That was the one with the mosaic,” Andy told them, cutting in. Joe drummed his fingers on the tablecloth.

“When were we there?”

“Fall. October.”

“Maybe November,” Nicky thought. He looked at Joe. “I was Christmas shopping for you.”

“Oasis!” Joe shouted. He pointed a finger at Copley. “Hotel Oasis. In the summer.”

Copley was dutifully taking notes on his iPad. “And this was nineteen fifty-six?”

The three immortals at the table glanced at each other. As one, they shrugged.

“It was in the fifties?” Joe guessed. Most likely. Probably. The cars… so yes, probably.

Copley rubbed his forehead in that way he did when they couldn’t remember exact dates. Well, what did he expect: when you lived nine hundred years, the difference between nineteen fifty-eight and fifty-seven became negligible.

“Were you on the Granma?”

Joe shrugged, looked over at Nicky. But Nicky had a look in his eye—that look that meant he couldn’t save someone, that he had failed. Oh, Nicky…

“Yes,” Nicky said, seriously. “We left after that. After we got the survivors to safety in the mountains. Went to…” He glanced at Joe, thinking. And now Joe remembered: the yacht, the crowded little boat, nearly sinking, nearly running out of gas. Andy refusing to participate but Nicky and Joe going because they were afraid for the men and women, afraid their plans would go awry. And they did, of course, with nearly everyone on the boat dying in a disastrous beach battle. They’d helped the survivors escape into the mountains—Nicky had held together boys’ guts with his bare hands, Joe had carried two men, one over each shoulder, only for Nicky to shove one off Joe’s arm, because he was dead, the young boy was long dead…

Joe placed his hand palm up on the table between them. Nicky latched on, fingers lacing together as they remembered those young, idealistic boys and girls—younger than Joe and Nicky had been, when war came to Jerusalem—and the terror in their eyes as they’d died.

He remembered, after. Needing a break. Joe smiled. “We went to Argentina after that.”

“Argentina? In… fifty-seven?” Copley asked, eyebrows raised. “It was a military dictatorship then.”

“What, no?” Joe wondered. “We went to see the woman, you loved her, Nicky.”

“Eva Peron—no, Joe, that was _before_ Cuba,” Nicky told him. “She died, before.”

Joe frowned. “Well, where did we go after Cuba?”

“Booker made you get out,” Andy remembered. “Before they sacked the Presidential palace. Felt too much like home—he could see it coming in the wind.”

“But where did we go?” Joe asked.

“Tunisia,” Andy said, looking at Joe. She smiled, just slightly, when Joe’s head swung to meet her eyes. “You went home.”

“It became a republic…” Joe whispered, remembering now. Nicky’s hand squeezed his own, and Joe squeezed back. Tears threatened, and Joe did nothing to hide them, wiping them with one crooked index finger and never letting go of Nicky’s hand. “That’s right. I remember now. They did it. They won their independence.”

“From the French,” Andy added, leaning into Copley with a chuckle. “Joe dragged Booker along for a vacation just to rub it in his face.”

Joe laughed, Booker’s long-suffering expression as vivid in his mind as if it happened yesterday. Joe had over-indulged in hash and was metaphorically drunk on self-governance, and had spent weeks celebrating in the streets with his countrymen—of their own country!—throwing confetti and streamers at Booker, dancing with Nicky and singing ancient war-chants at him in a dialect no living Maghrebi—“Tunisian,” they were called _Tunisians_ now, because they had their own country!—knew. Booker had laughed, and drank for Joe, and put his face in his hands more times than Joe could count, begging “I didn’t support the French colonization of your lands, Joe, come on-”

“And where were you two during this time?” Copley asked, back to taking notes. Everyone at the table looked at him, confused, until Copley looked back up at the silence. “Andy and Nicky,” he clarified.

“Nicky was with me,” Joe said, voice lilting up like it was a question, almost. Except the question wasn’t where Nicky was, but was why it wasn’t clear that wherever Joe was, Nicky was. Anything permitting, at least.

“I tagged along for a bit,” Andy said. “Bought Joe some hash.”

“Did _you_ buy it, or did you just _say_ you were going to buy it and then stuck me with the bill?” Joe mused. Andy just shot him a smirk before continuing.

“Think I took off to… Vietnam, maybe, or Korea, after that. Was that when the United States was in Korea?”

“Yes,” Copley confirmed.

“Then Korea,” Andy said.

“Now I want to lie out on a beach,” Joe sighed. He grinned at Nicky. “Want to find a beach with me? I’ll lotion your back.”

“We’re in Denmark,” Nicky reminded him dryly. But then he acquiesced, head tilting to the side. “Maybe we should go for a few days. Leave Nile with Andy.” Nicky looked at Andy straight-faced. “There is a lot of training you have left to cover with her, after all.”

Andy rolled her eyes, like Nicky’s bullshitting about Nile’s _training_ was anything to do with Nicky and Joe jetting off on a mini sexcation for a few days.

Copley flipped to another picture on his iPad. “What about this one-”

* * *

_Photo: 1968, place unknown. Joe and Nicky, helping a man out of a hole—mine collapse? Civilian attire[…]_

Joe frowned down at the photo in his hands.

“I have no memory of this place.”

“Didn’t take you for a Tolkein fan,” Copley commented. Joe looked up, confused. He knew he was an author, of course, but he didn’t know what Copley was responding to. When he looked over to Nicky, his love just shrugged at him. Must be a reference Joe had inadvertently stumbled into.

“We can’t always remember,” Nicky said quietly. His gaze was fixed on the photo, eyes tracing the profile of the young stranger. Although he had just stated so baldly the fact of their lives, his eyes were troubled, and he seemed to be wracking his brain for a memory of this young stranger—seconds, minutes spent with him, and then gone from their lives forever. He could be dead by natural causes by now—the photo was from nearly sixty years in the past, and he looked at least Joe and Nicky’s age all those years ago.

He was almost certainly dead by now, in fact. Joe wiped his hand over his mouth and tucked his arms against his chest. Sixty years past, already. And they could not remember this man, or what had happened, why he needed saving, what country even they were in.

Nicky looked up and slid the photo back across the table to Copley. “I’m sorry.”

Copley took the photo. By some grace, he did not move on directly to the next photo, nor berate them for being unable to help (because they could not remember this man, or his life, or country). Instead, Copley allowed them a minute of quiet.

Joe tapped at the table indicating the photo Copley still had not tucked away.

“At least you looked very handsome in that checkered shirt.”

That, at least, coaxed a smile out of his Nicky.

“I did not wear it nearly as well as some,” Nicky rejoined.

Joe beamed at his Nicky. Of course, he thought Nicky looked good in every era, in every style clothing (and out of them, _especially_ ). But it was joyous to see him in fashions passed. Fond memories, and the delight of seeing Nicky in something different from whatever his current usual clothing was.

Ah, but the work. Joe tapped the table, sighing as he broke eye contact with Nicky. “Come on, then. Maybe we’ll have better luck with the next one.”

* * *

_Photo: 1968, Selma march. Nicky left of center in frame._

“Anti-miscegenation laws,” Nicky spat.

Copley grimaced. “Yes.”

“Miserable people, imposing their miserable, hateful will over others,” he continued. Joe reached a hand out and squeezed at Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky didn’t look at him, but he did lean into the touch. “Legislating against _love_.”

“Once, you thought the same,” Joe reminded Nicky, gently. Nicky shook his head, arms crossed tight over his chest.

“I did. I was a fool.” Nicky turned, eyes big pools of stormy seas. Joe smiled softly at him, happy to spend an eternity drowning in those eyes.

Copley glanced at Nicky, clearly wondering at what racism once existed in his past. Joe shook his head and answered the question Copley was too polite to ask:

“It was centuries ago,” Joe explained. “When Nicky’s Pope told him of the devilry of people who looked like me.”

Nicky looked at Joe, those cool, beautiful eyes studying his face. “Now I can barely remember what mental contortions I must have undertaken, to look at Joe and see hatred instead of kindness; sin instead of salvation.”

Joe veritably swooned. His heart. His love. Nicky smiled faintly at him, but his eyes were still troubled. He turned to Copley and pointed at the picture.

“Ever since, I cannot let hatred and bigotry hide behind religion, behind politics. Especially not bigotry which keeps two people apart, for something as simple as the color of their skin.” He looked to Joe. “Or their religion.” Joe winked at him. It lightened Nicky’s expression, just enough to smooth the tightness from the corner of his eyes, to turn the corners of his mouth up into just the _hint_ of a smile. Job done, then.

“Do you know which marches exactly you were at? Other protests: dates, locations?”

Nicky sighed, fingers drumming on his own biceps, arms still crossed, as he thought. Joe squinted and leaned back, lacing his fingers together behind his head.

“This one is Selma?” Joe asked, nodding at the photo.

“Yes. Nineteen sixty-eight.”

“Before. There were busses,” Joe remembered. “Kids helping register people to vote. We protected them.”

“As many of them as we could,” Nicky murmured. He glanced up at Copley. “In the eighties it happened again. The same laws. Against love.”

Copley frowned. “Anti-miscegenation laws? I didn’t realize. Was this in the United States, or-?” But Nicky was shaking his head. Joe sighed, dropping his hands from behind his head. He knew what Nicky was thinking of.

“Anti-gay laws. United States, again. And: there were…” he swallowed, glanced at Nicky. “They called them die-ins. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” Nicky murmured.

“There might be pictures,” Joe explained. “Much of what we do, it is behind the scenes. Protecting those kids driving around registering people to vote: I don’t think there’s many pictures of us there. But the die-ins. The point was the pictures. So we might be in those, somewhere.”

Nicky snapped his fingers suddenly. “The town. The children at the school.”

Joe groaned, rubbing his hands over his face. Right, right. It was famous, now. There was art—the same pictures showed up over and over again.

“Alabama?” he thought, maybe. “Or Mississippi? United States south. When they were integrating the schools. Nicky, Andy, and Booker were doing crowd work. Trying to keep things from getting out of hand.”

Copley didn’t ask where Joe was. As a man with his skin color, he didn’t have to. Instead, he said: “It was Mississippi. When Eisenhower called in the national guard to desegregate schools.”

Joe snapped his fingers. “Yeah, yeah. Cops versus army. That’s why we were there. We weren’t sure how bad it might get.” He waved a hand. “So you might want to go through those photos.”

Copley was dutifully recording all this on his computer, fingers clicking away softly at the keyboard. So much softer than they’d been for the last two hundred years or so: just when they had gotten used to slamming away at the heavy keys of the typewriter, things changed, and changed, and changed again, until there was no keyboard left, just a smooth pane of glass which Nile’s fingers _flew_ over and the rest of them grumpily pecked away one-fingered at.

“I’ll look into it. Thank you.” Copley glanced between Nicky and Joe, looking like maybe he was going to say something else. But he just nodded and turned back to his computer screen. Joe shot a smile over to Nicky, but he wasn’t looking: attention fixed instead on the photo of himself sixty years ago, protesting for people’s right to love who they loved, and live their lives in peace. After a moment Nicky turned, feeling Joe’s gaze on him. His lips twisted bitterly.

“It’s happening again.”

“I know,” Joe sighed.

“It’s always happening. One way or another.”

Leaning over, Joe cupped one hand around the back of Nicky’s neck, stroking his thumb over the short hairs there. “Well then it’s a good thing they’ve got us, huh babe?”

Nicky snorted as they bumped their foreheads together, bad mood temporarily relieved. Copley didn’t appear to pay them any mind.

* * *

_Photo: 1861, United States, Andy, Nicky, Joe, Booker. Union Army, Calvary Corp[…]_

Their apartment in Istanbul was not _strictly_ a safe house, which is why Andy refused to stay at it. But Nile was happy to spend some time in the city, rather than in some barren wasteland outskirts like Andy preferred to hunker down in. Nicky and Joe had been happy to play host to their newest baby sister—they had never had a younger sister before (not in nearly nine hundred years, at least, and even then it was only Joe who had had the pleasure) and they took turns fighting over who would get to spoil her each day. Joe was teaching her Turkish, Nicky taking her to the Bazaar for the experience and then smaller, less known spice markets and farmers markets every day to introduce her to Turkish cuisine (which Joe was _more_ than happy to be the recipient of, after what felt like too long in Western Europe—and _worse_ , _England_ ).

But today their kitchen table was cleared of delicious foods and flour and English-Turkish dictionaries and instead was covered in stacks of file folders, color-coordinated and highlighted and covered in post-it notes and Copley’s messy script. Joe frowned down at the folders like it was _their_ fault Nicky wasn’t feeding him Turkish delight right now (or that they weren’t making their _own_ delight, in their bedroom, on this beautiful day…).

“Do you remember which battles you participated in? Which regiments? Generals you served under, missions you were sent on-”

“Calm yourself, James,” Nicky told him. He was carrying a tray of delicate Turkish tea glasses, setting it onto the table and then distributing one glass each to Copley, Joe, Nile, and himself. He returned with the tray a moment later, re-laden with assorted desserts to munch on. Joe sighed happily as he slid into his seat alongside Nicky and snatched up a piece of baklava for himself. He bussed a kiss to Nicky’s cheek as Copley picked up his tea glass and sipped at it absently. He was scribbling onto one of his papers while he drank—the man didn’t take the time to enjoy life, in Joe’s opinion. To take things one at a time and savor them. Maybe that was the way it went, though, when you had so few years. Maybe Joe had forgotten.

“What’s this?” Nile asked as she sat down at the table with them. She grabbed at some of the photos and started sorting through them. “You guys fought in the Civil War?!”

“Sì. Some of it,” Nicky admitted. “I don’t think we did much. It was such a vast war. It didn’t feel there was much we could do, us few.”

“Actually…” Copley pulled out what looked like a family tree from one of his files and unfolded it, spreading it across the top of the papers. “Ms. Freeman: I thought this might interest you.”

Nile peered at the genealogy—because it was that, Joe could see, as he took a closer look—tugging the paper around so it was right-side up for her. Nile sipped absently at her tea as she read. Then her eyes widened.

“Wait a minute—that’s my grandma!”

“On your mother’s side, yes,” Copley confirmed. “Records are difficult for African-Americans, of course, but I believe, if I’ve got this right, that your great-great-great grandmother was freed by…” he looked over at Joe. “Sergeant Joseph Jones.”

Joe blinked. Then he scrambled around the table to squint down at the genealogy alongside Nile. “No…”

“It was after the Battle of Jonesborough. When Atlanta fell. You were there, correct?”

Joe’s heart clenched as he looked up at Nicky. Yes. He remembered that. Oh, it was awful. Thousands dead. But when the dust settled and the skies cleared, they had liberated the southern city, and, more importantly, they could spread that liberation to the plantations sprawling out from the metro area.

They’d gone out as a small group—just their little army of four—as the generals regrouped and counted their dead, organized to move on to Savannah. They had seen the shackles of slavery—experienced it themselves too, at some unfortunate times and others—and never wanted a person to suffer an hour more under that terrible yolk than they had to. So as soon as the battle was won (and Nicky had helped as much as he could with the wounded), they’d gone out as a liberation army of four. They went from one plantation to the next, telling the owners that their fight was over, and their slaves were freed. And then they waited to make sure it happened.

“What was her name?” Joe asked, fingers tracing backwards over the genealogy.

“Ruth,” Copley said. “Ruth Harrison—from the Harrison plantation, that is.”

Joe strained his memory, tried to put a face to the name. Had he even learned the name of every slave they’d freed? There were so many faces—burnt and cracked from the sun, backs stooped from a lifetime of servitude. Had there been a young woman with Nile’s eyes, with her skin, with her smile, her nose? Joe looked over at the woman beside him who was staring at him with wide eyes shining with tears.

“We didn’t do much,” Joe told her. “There were others—freed people, men and women who went back, who won their freedom and then turned around into the face of hell to pull their friends, their family, complete strangers out with them. We just…”

Nicky’s hand on his arm, his solid presence beside him.

“We did what we could,” Nicky told Nile. “I am honored, if in some small thing we did, it led to you.”

Nile collapsed forward, grabbing them both into a hug. Joe hugged back fiercely, tears in his eyes, pressing his cheek to the tight box braids he had helped Nile style her hair into just this week.

“ _Sorellina_ ,” Nicky sighed, wrapped around Nile’s other side.

 _Little sister_. Joe pressed a kiss to her temple and squeezed her tight.

They could never do enough. And they were only one small, forgotten part of any conflict they found themselves involved in. But, praise Allah, they had done _something_ , and that something had led to something so beautiful. A missing piece of their family that they could now hold, and love, for ( _Inshallah_ ) centuries to come.

* * *

_Photo: 1915/1916/1917? WWI, France. Joe pictured with two children—one girl, unidentified, aged approximately 7-10; one girl, identified: Marie-Hélène Varte, aged approximately 2-5. Varte would go on to be the youngest Laureate for the Nobel Prize in medicine thanks to her work-_

“I have a drawer just on World War One,” Copley said without preamble as he sat down at Joe and Nicky’s table outside the coffee shop. He had what was presumably the contents of said drawer with him: stacks of accordion folders wrapped in rubber bands and still nearly bursting, at that. Joe’s eyebrows crept up into his baseball hat, while Nicky made a disgruntled noise next to him as Copley stacked the folders onto the table in front of them. It was with great remorse that Joe placed his hand on Nicky’s thigh and squeezed, begging for patience. Usually it was Nicky reminding Joe, but Copley _had_ been good to them (so far), and patient with them as they met him in their own time.

That _was_ a _large_ pile of files, though. Joe blanched.

“Not going to buy us a drink, first?” Joe joked, trying to ease Nicky’s mood. Copley looked dumbly at the espressos both Joe and Nicky had before them.

“Oh. Did you-”

“Kidding,” Joe told him, patting Copley’s arm maybe a _touch_ too hard. Copley stared nervously at Joe, even when he sat back and took a sip from his espresso.

“Please. Begin,” Nicky said, and to anyone else it would sound like the model of politeness. But to Joe’s well-trained ear, Nicky’s tone was already bored and annoyed with the entire process. The Great War wasn’t the easiest of memories for them, and it looked as though Copley meant to question them for days on it.

“I have photos of Andy—at the Gallipoli campaign in 1915; in France in 1918, amongst others. So I have her activities relatively pinned down for the time period. Let’s see, what…” Copley pulled out another photo and slid it across the table at Joe. “France. I can’t pinpoint it down to an exact year better than a three-year span.”

Joe shook his head as he looked at the photo of himself with the little girls, taking them to (hopefully) safety and away from the front.

The Great War. What a brutal, terrifying place. And there had been children there—oh, there always was, of course. But the Great War, it was something different. Something new, and horrible.

“I couldn’t tell you more than that,” Joe told Copley. He passed the photo to Nicky, who shook his head.

“Do you remember where you were during this time, Nicky?” Copley asked. He had his iPad out, a digital pencil of some kind hovering over the display.

Nicky frowned and glanced at Joe, who snorted softly. Copley couldn’t have been watching them _that_ close, if he had to ask such a question.

“I was there,” Nicky confirmed.

“Right, of course, in the war. But do you remember any of your exact whereabouts? Places and dates?”

“He means he was there, with me. Right here,” Joe indicated, tapping his finger a few inches to the left of the glossy photo. “We always work together.”

“If we can help it,” Nicky added.

“How many nights apart, do you think? In nine hundred years?” Joe mused.

“We were keeping count, once. It was less than a hundred.”

“Couldn’t be much more, now,” Joe declared, sure.

Copley glanced between them, gears clearly turning in his mind. “So if I have documentation of one of you at a certain location, and there’s no contradictory documentation, there’s a high probability that the others are there, too?”

“Yup,” Joe said, popping his ‘p.’ “We’d remember the times apart more than the times together—we could tell you when those come up.”

“Am I meant to take that badly?” Nicky mused.

“Only because they are so terrible,” Joe reassured his heart. “I remember them like nightmares, whereas time spent with you fades like sweet dreams.”

Nicky hummed, glint in his eye like he was going to get Joe for that, later. Joe couldn’t wait.

Copley, much like Andy and Booker but with much less practice, already seemed adept at tuning out Joe and Nicky’s romantic asides. He was scribbling notes on his iPad and pulling out another photo from his stack with his other hand. Joe sighed and reached for it. They had a lot more to go.

* * *

Copley had barged into their safe house with his largest batch of files yet. Joe hung off the side of the door as he watched Copley hauling an entire plastic _tub_ of files onto their kitchen table.

“Make yourself at home,” Joe grumbled as he shut the door. Nicky came out of the bathroom just then, spotting Copley and then the tub of files in quick succession. His eyes met Joe’s and they exchanged a _look_. Nicky finished wiping his hands dry on his jeans. “I’ll get us some drinks. James?”

“Coffee, please,” Copley demanded. Joe grumbled and flicked the door shut with one hand. Well. Looks like this was what he and Nicky were doing for the foreseeable future. Joe followed Nicky into the kitchen proper, leaving Copley at their dining table out in the living room.

“Where’s my pipe?” Joe grumbled, even as he slid his hands around Nicky’s waist and pressed his nose into the back of his neck.

“Where you left it last, I’m sure: on the end table next to your armchair.”

Yeah, that sounded right. Joe made a complaining noise and stayed glued to Nicky’s back as Nicky moved around the kitchen, preparing drinks for everyone and even pulling together a tray of snacks: crackers and fruits and cheese, because Nicky was wonderful, and Joe wasn’t worthy of the love of such a beautiful man.

As Nicky worked he hummed to himself, and Joe found his eyes drifting closed, listening to Nicky, smelling the clean, fresh smell of his skin, feeling their bodies pressed together nearly toe to head. Joe nuzzled at Nicky’s neck and pressed three gentle kisses there, moving his way from the back to the front. Nicky was smiling when Joe reached the side of his face, and turned to return Joe’s kisses, drawing him into a sweet, slow kiss.

“James is in the next room,” Nicky reminded him. Joe was going to protest that he was not _nearly_ so uncouth as to need the reminder, but then Nicky shifted backwards and Joe was suddenly very aware that his dick had started to chub up while he had been embracing his love. Joe sighed and drew Nicky into one more kiss before peeling himself off Nicky’s back, putting some space between them to give his body time to realize it wasn’t getting any. At least, not right this moment.

It was World War II. That was why Copley brought an entire tub with him today. Joe sighed and puffed on his pipe, probably too much, but he was not about to deal with six years of a world-wide war worth of memories without a little bit of hash. And he knew for a fact Nicky had poured himself a mug that was more limoncello than tea by volume.

“And then these two, Nicky, that’s you at Pearl Harbor—that’s December nineteen forty-one. Joe, do you remember where you were at that time?”

“Pearl Harbor,” Joe said with a shrug. Even if he didn’t remember it specifically—which he did, if only because it became such a pop culture mainstay in the subsequent years—he would know he was there because he doesn’t remember _not_ being by Nicky’s side for almost the entire war. If there were moments they were separated, it was just that: mere moments, maybe a day, here or there. But never more than a few miles from each other, _never_ in separate countries or fronts of the war. Not even when Nicky’s people had started their African invasion—not to Joe’s people, as they had briefly feared, but much further south, all the way down to… what was it called now? Ethiopia, he thought, unless it had changed recently. 

“I got the impression you split up for the duration of the war,” Copley asked. As he did, he pointed at some photos in particular: Andy in France, Booker on some island Joe couldn’t remember the name of near Japan, Nicky in France… Joe shook his head. Copley glanced at him. “There were so many fronts…” he continued.

“Andy stayed with the French resistance, mostly,” Nicky confirmed. “We joined the Pacific Theater once V-E Day happened.”

“Do you have more specific dates? Places?”

Nicky looked at Joe, thinking. After a moment Joe snapped his fingers and gestured at him with his pipe.

“D-Day. We were in that, right?”

“Oh! Yes. The famous day. We landed on… the beach…” He waved his hand vaguely. “What was the beach?”

Copley flipped through his pictures before landing on one in particular. He pointed at Nicky’s face. A flicker of a smile crossed Nicky’s face as Joe beamed.

“Oh! Look, hayati! It’s you!”

Copley rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Yes. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Nicky glanced at the piles of photos Copley had flipped through to get to this one, eyes landing on one in particular. He reached out, mumbling “May I?” though he didn’t wait for an answer as he pulled it from the stack.

It was a picture of Nicky in a medic’s uniform, squatting down as he tended to a small child. Joe sighed, swaying into Nicky as they gazed down at the picture together. He couldn’t remember that child in particular, that moment—if he survived, if he was reunited with his parents. If he was Jewish, German, Italian, British. Even if he’d lived, the boy would be an old, old man by now. He could have lived a full life, had children and grandchildren, and be dead. Would most certainly be, given just another ten years or so. Another decade and there would be no one left on earth who remembered what horrors that second World War inflicted upon the human race.

No one, save four.

“His name was Laurent,” Nicky said. He looked up at Copley. “Did you know that?”

“I did,” Copley confirmed, meeting Nicky’s gaze. No easy feat, Joe knew.

“Do you know what happened to him?”

He only had to consult his notes for a moment, like he was just double-checking information that was already in his head. “Fifty years later, Laurent was honored with the Pasteur Institute Medal for his work on DNA. His genomic sequencing led to some of the breakthroughs that would eventually be used for forensic DNA profiling. Countless rapists and murderers have been caught because of this work. And innocent people too: released from life sentences. Families reunited, long-lost relatives found.”

Nicky breathed heavily through his nose, falling back against his chair. Joe reached over to him, wrapped his hand around the back of Nicky’s neck, massaged his fingers over his scalp. Joe blinked tears back as Nicky stared, dry-eyed but unblinking, at the photo of himself and a little blond boy on a battlefield so long ago.

“The first man his technique was used on was Colin Pitchfork. He raped and murdered two fifteen-year-old girls. He was caught because of his DNA. Not only that, but an innocent man with cognitive impairments, Richard Buckland, had confessed to one of the murders under questioning years earlier. Richard was released based on the DNA evidence. Without Laurent’s work, an innocent man would have been imprisoned, and a two-time rapist and murder would have been free to do God knows what else.” Copley swallowed thickly before continuing: “That was in nineteen eighty-seven. That was the first case that used Laurent’s work. Thirty years ago.”

 _Exponential_ , was the word Copley had used early on to try and explain how much good they had done over the years. How for every one life they saved, thousands more were made better, saved, created. It was hard to see it all the time, to remember it when there were children dying around them, when there were men killing babies, razing whole towns to the ground, and Nicky and Joe found blood on their hands and pulling one, two children from the ashes, and no more.

But this one little boy. Nicky had saved him, and he went on and saved so many more. Tears tracking down his cheeks, Joe leaned over and kissed Nicky’s hair.

 _“Nicolo._ _Hai vissuto una vita bellissima.”_

“ _Io so,”_ Nicky whispered back. “I know.”

* * *

_Photo: Joe Democratic Republic of Congo, pictured with children. One boy in the picture will go on-_

They were at a school in Syria, watching over the children there after Copley had told them there was a threat of ISIL pulling the girls out of the school. Nile and Andy should probably have been the only point of contact for them, but Joe and Nicky couldn’t help themselves when children were involved. They spoke to the kids in their own language, asking them about their days, their schoolwork, their hopes and dreams. Joe found himself teaching an impromptu art class after school three days a week while Nicky tutored the children who needed help in math (and gave the quicker children puzzles and problems far advanced from anything the war-torn school could manage to provide). Andy showed up one day with a shipment of laptops from who knows where and started working with the municipal government to get internet up and running throughout the city—until the next time fighters of who knew what faction tore through their town yet again, razing all their progress down to dust. Joe grimaced and set his mind back to the smiling faces of the children before him, holding one in his lap as the sweet little boy colored with broken crayons, and pointing to an older girl’s drawing of a horse and correcting her anatomy here or there with an easy stroke of a pencil.

“How do you do that?” the girl griped in Arabic. She tried to copy Joe’s pencil strokes, with limited success. “You drew two lines and it was a horse! I can’t do it with fifty lines.”

Joe shifted the babe in his arms to his other knee as he leaned forward to show the girl. “Ah, but it took _hundreds_ of lines before I learned how to do it in two. _Thousands_. Maybe even _millions_.”

Far from discouraging her, his words appeared to fortify the girl’s resolve—which was the point, of course. She gestured imperiously at Joe.

“Show me again?”

Joe grinned and showed her again. And again, and again.

After his ad hoc art class was over, Joe handed the children off to their parents or sent them down the road in the hands of their elder siblings. A few had no one to walk with, so Joe and Nicky walked with them down the dusty roads to their family homes, chattering away with the children as they explained _this_ thing they’d learned in history today, or _that_ thing they’d learned about grammar. The littlest boy Joe carried up on his shoulders, laughing as the boy pulled his baseball hat from his head. Nicky commiserated with a young girl as she gripped about spelling.

“The only language with any good sense to its spelling is Italian,” he confided to the girl. “Every sound is a letter, and every letter is a sound. There is no mysterious silent letters or confusion about how to spell this or that. Every word is spelled as it is said.”

“But Arabic is Allah’s chosen language,” Joe reminded him. Nicky sniffed.

“That may be, but I am not omniscient as Him. I need a language which makes _sense_ when you go to write it.”

The satellite signal was shit, but Copley still insisted on doing video calls with them instead of just sending them emails or whatever. Something about encryption and paper trails—Joe didn’t understand it. That night, the four of them gathered around one battered laptop and watched as Copley worked through a slideshow he’d prepared for them.

 _“This is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo_ ,” Copley was explaining on the screen. “ _Dated to twenty ten. Does that sound right?_ ”

It was a picture of Joe on screen with a gaggle of children. Joe grinned but shook his head.

“Who knows? Sounds right.” Joe pointed at the kids. “What happened with them? Is it something good?”

 _“One of the boys in this picture went on to become a hip hop star,”_ Copley explained.

Nicky shot Joe a pained look. “Hip hop?”

“It’s a music genre,” Joe told him, patting his leg. “Hey! We could look up his songs! What’s his name?”

_“Kofi Bahati. He’s inspiring something of a movement amongst the young people in the DRC. Building schools, getting access to internet, laptops. Bringing in micro-loan money to help local communities build their infrastructure and businesses.”_

Joe beamed and shook Nicky’s leg. “My boy! We’ll listen to his music tonight!”

Suddenly Nile sat up. “Wait. Could we have kids?”

Andy burst out laughing, and Joe and Nicky exchanged a look full of nine hundred years of longing.

“No,” Andy said decisively.

“By which she means, you can’t get pregnant,” Joe hurried on to explain. He shot Andy a disappointed look. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have children.”

“Wait, can _you_ have kids?” Nile asked. “I mean, you know: if you ever had sex with anyone _else_.” She snickered.

“No,” Nicky told her. “We are infertile.” He looked to Joe and smiled tightly. “But like Joe said: that does not mean we never had children.”

 _“One moment, please,”_ Copley said, frantically typing on the other side of his screen. “ _You’re infertile? You’re certain?”_

“Well I haven’t had my bleeding in about six thousand years,” Andy observed with a snort.

“I checked,” Nicky admitted matter-of-factly. “On samples from Joe and myself. Our sperm is nonviable.”

“Ew,” Nile commented. Nicky just shrugged.

“When the technology made it possible, I looked into it. Better to know than not.”

Then Nile shook her head, waving her hands. “Wait. Back up. Did you guys _raise kids_?”

Joe and Nicky exchanged a look. But Copley was watching them, and they were not going to share such an intimate part of their lives with him—not when it couldn’t matter at all for his work to erase their presence from history. Nicky turned to Nile and smiled gently.

“Ask us again sometime, sorellina.”

Joe winked at her in reassurance. Nile sat back, curiosity burning on her face.

Joe looked back over at Nicky, heart full near to bursting with the memory of the children they’d raised—for days or for decades, and everything in between. Nicky’s hand crept out and slid into Joe’s own, twining their fingers together. _Later_.

* * *

They were all heading to Copley’s place, because apparently he had some sort of emergency leak to deal with. And it wasn’t something he could discuss with them over the phone, or even in a public place. The material was apparently so “sensitive” that they had to risk converging on his home again, even though they’d agreed after the first couple meetings that it would be best to be seen there as little as possible, in an effort to keep anyone from drawing a connection between their little army and their man-behind-the-desk.

Copley had only called Joe and Nicky directly, but they were all staying in a safehouse in Amsterdam together, and Andy and Nile had invited themselves right along when they heard what a sensitive issue this apparently was. They all had come up with _theories_ as they flew over to London—was there something in a museum Copley couldn’t get to? Some relic of Joe and Nicky’s that was about to go public, like a painting or notebook? Perhaps someone had discovered an old home of theirs they’d forgotten entirely over the centuries and the archeological evidence was particularly damning (though neither Joe nor Nicky could come up with any particular place they’d ever lived that would be so dangerous)—but by the time the four made it to Copley’s London home they were no closer to figuring it out than they were when Joe hung up the call in Amsterdam.

“Alright, Copley,” Andy said, taking point even when it wasn’t her Copley had called in to see. “What’s the problem?”

Copley coughed delicately, eyes darting between Andy and Nile.

“This is really only a problem for Joe and Nicky. I, ah. I expected to be speaking to them alone.”

Nile frowned, pushing forward in front of Joe and Nicky. Joe felt a great surge of affection for his little sister. She was a warrior, Andy was right: ready to fight for her family. Even if they didn’t need protecting.

“What you can say to them you can say to us,” Nile insisted, chin jut out.

Copley rubbed at his forehead. “It’s not like that,” he grumbled. But he held both hands up in surrender as he turned back to his computer. “But fine. You all know that I have web crawlers running facial recognition searches constantly, in order to catch any and all new video, photo, anything that crops up on the internet that could identify you.” He looked at them. “I want to make very clear: these are automatic programs. I did not stumble upon this accidentally. My programs are designed to search the internet for your faces.”

Nile frowned. “Why does that- _oh_. Oh, _shit_.”

Joe looked at her, then at Copley, then at Nicky. Nile appeared appalled, hand at her mouth. Copley’s face was screwed up in… well, he looked embarrassed, and apologetic. Nicky looked just as confused as Joe felt. They shrugged at each other and turned back to Copley.

“Well? Don’t leave us in suspense,” Joe teased.

“I’ve already taken it down. But I need to know if you have any copies. I, uh.” Copley glanced at Nile, who had _clearly_ figured something out, and then back to Joe and Nicky. “You can look at it yourselves, if you need to… identify it.”

Joe pushed past Nile to get to Copley’s computer, curious what all the fuss was about. Copley scurried away, gesturing:

“You can just press… hang on, let me mute it first-”

Joe barked a laugh. _Oh_.

“Nicky! It’s the video we made making love!”

Nicky scurried over double-time at that to peer at Copley’s computer screen over Joe’s shoulder. He grinned.

“Ah! Play it.”

Copley’s hands darted out. “No, I haven’t muted-”

Joe pressed the little arrow button on the video. It started playing, full sound and all.

_“Nicolo, my sweet. You taste so good.”_

_“Yusuf, please, your mouth-”_

_“Let me take you, now.”_

_“Yes, Yusuf, yes. I am yours-”_

Copley leapt forward, smacking the spacebar to pause the video and then poking frantically at the volume control buttons.

Andy was snickering in the back of the room, but trying to put on a stern face. Nile was fully turned around, facing the back wall with her hands over her ears, shouting _“LA LA LA LA LA LA_ -!” Andy snorted and reached over to slap her, pointing that it was safe to turn around. Nile did, arms crossed over her chest and looking _very_ disappointed in the two of them.

“You all made a _sex tape_?!” Nile shouted.

Andy was having a _very_ hard time not laughing her ass off. She kept pulling her mouth down into a frown, eyebrows pressed low, and then as soon as she tried to talk she would break, snort escaping from her, dropping her face into her hand as she laughed and laughed.

“No, yes.” Andy pulled her expression back down into a Very Serious Frown. “That’s-” her voice cracked and she laughed, “-dangerous-” she broke down and covered her mouth with her hand again, laughing and laughing.

Joe beamed, pressing a hand to the back of Nicky’s neck, stroking at the short hairs back there. “You look beautiful, my love,” he observed, gesturing at the screen. It was frozen on Joe climbing on top of Nicky, hands gripping his thighs, hauling him up so Joe could take him while their home video recorder watched. Nicky nudged Joe with a secretive little smile.

“You would say that.”

“I mean it.”

Nicky looked up at Nile and then over at Copley, who was standing off to the side now that he was _fairly_ confident Joe wasn’t going to start playing their sex video again. Still within range, though, to dive in if Joe _did_ go for it. It would certainly be funny to see. But Joe restrained himself. For now. Nicky explained:

“This was the nineteen… eighties? I believe? We were very excited about home video recording technology.”

Copley grimaced. “Yes, I was able to date it by the grain on the video. And the fact that there’s a date in the bottom corner.”

Joe and Nicky simultaneously peered down at the video. Ah! There it was, in orange type: 11.15.84 Joe marveled at that little artifact preserving the date better than their memories ever could. But his Nicky did look beautiful, splayed out on the bed. Joe frowned, a little annoyed Copley wasn’t letting them watch more of the video.

“Can we have this?” Joe asked, gesturing at the video. “Could you… e-mail it? To our phones?”

“ _Guys_ ,” Nile whined. “That is the _opposite_ of what we’re supposed to be doing with shit like this!”

“But look at how beautiful Nicky looks!” Joe explained. “Like poetry in motion.”

Andy’s face was in her hands. “Joe.” She _tried_ to snap his name, but she was still snorting, trying not to laugh. “The job is to minimize what we leave behind. You two should have known better back then.”

“Boss, it’s not like we could’ve anticipated the internet,” Joe complained.

“You said you took it down?” Nicky checked with Copley.

He nodded, tight-lipped. “Yes. This is the only remaining copy. I just needed to confirm it was you-”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I had Nicky screaming my name by the end, it shouldn’t be hard-” Next to him, Nicky snorted and tucked his face towards Joe, like he was trying to hide that he was finding this as funny as Joe was from the rest of the team—or from Copley, at least. Joe grinned and shoved at him. “Do you remember, Nicky? That sound right?”

“I may not remember the exact words uttered, but as that is usually how things go…” Nicky mused, smiling up at him.

Joe threw his thumb at the computer screen. “But can’t we have this? As long as it’s not on the internet?” he asked Copley.

The poor man looked so pained. Joe grinned more. Oh, they should go find some of the erotic art Joe had left littering most the globe over the centuries. See how Copley dealt with Nicky’s beautiful penis, a foot long and lovingly rendered in acrylics. It might be good for the man. Remind him why life was worth living. It certainly served to remind Joe—every day. Joe found his gaze drifting from Copley to Nicky, contemplating his beloved’s form. He should paint him in acrylics again. It had been far too long…

“Even if I did give you the only file, your computers could be hacked, your phones…”

Andy sighed in the back of the room. “No. I’m making the call: no trace left lying around.” Then she pushed her way up to Copley’s desk, grabbing at the monitor to turn it to herself. “But, before he wipes it forever…”

“Andy!” Nile hissed, turning herself _fully_ around so she couldn’t catch sight of them. Andy reached her long arms under the screen and hit play on the recording, the sound of their lovemaking filling the room again. Nicky and Joe scrambled around the desk to watch with Andy. Joe crossed his arms proudly as he watched himself plunder his beloved, Nicky’s body singing under his hands. Nicky’s hands were on his hips, fond little smile at the corner of his mouth.

“You look good,” Andy complimented them as she watched.

“Thank you,” Joe replied magnanimously.

“ _Grazie_ ,” said Nicky.

“I’m not going to be able to look at you guys for a week,” Nile whined, still facing the other direction with her hands over her ears.

Copley edged towards Nile, also avoiding looking at his own computer screen as much as he could. Joe couldn’t understand why. Even if he didn’t desire men, their bodies together were an aesthetic delight, sexual preference or no.

“So you didn’t know about this either?” Copley asked Nile as Joe and Nicky’s sex tape continued to play.

“About their sex tape?! No!” Nile exclaimed. Then she sighed and shrugged. “I mean, I guess I should have _figured_. Of course _those two_ would’ve wanted to ‘make a record of their love,’ or whatever.”

Nicky called over his shoulder: “We also wanted to see how ‘hot’ we looked.” He turned and grinned at Nile. “The answer: very. We are very hot.”

“You guys are the worst.”

Copley coughed delicately. “Ah. So you knew they were… together?” He glanced at Nicky and Joe. “Unless this was an… aberration?”

Joe saw red. “ _What_ did you call us?”

Copley held his hands up, stumbling back a step. “I mean… I wasn’t sure if you two were… or of this was just one time…?”

“This is not an _aberration_ ,” Joe spat. “It was not ‘one time’ or a _fling_. This man has held my heart for a millennium, and he will continue-”

“Joe,” Andy cut him off with an eye roll. “Seriously.”

Next to him, Nicky made a soft noise of disappointment. “I love hearing the poetry Joe spins about our love.”

“I know you do,” Andy grumbled. Facing Copley, she threw a thumb at the two of them. “These two old women think they invented love. They’ve been together since the start.”

“Once we stopped killing each other,” Joe corrected her.

“And learned to speak a common language.”

Joe’s eyes gleamed at exactly what ‘language’ they had in common, but before he could make a joke about it Nile turned to Copley and said “Wait: did you not _know_ Joe and Nicky were… Joe and Nicky??”

“That they were… romantically entangled?” Copley phrased it delicately. “No. I had no idea until this video.”

“How could you _not know_?!” Nile asked, bug-eyed. “They’re…” She gestured at them, hand flailing. In her astonishment she made the mistake of looking over at them before wincing dramatically and slapping a hand over her eyes. “ _Guys_. The _screen_.”

Joe glanced over his shoulder. He and Nicky were on ‘pause’ again, Nicky’s legs thrown over his shoulders as Joe gripped his hips tight and drove deep inside his beloved. Nicky’s neck was thrown back in the most delectable way, chin proud and tendons taut. Allah, but he was beautiful. But, in deference to his little sister, Joe turned the screen back around on Copley’s desk so it wasn’t facing the room at large.

“That’s _homophobic_ ,” Nile was saying to Copley. “Haven’t they… been _around_ you? A lot? They’re so obvious! Have they ever said they love each other in front of you?”

“Well, I’m sure…” Copley thought. “But, of course, I assumed anyone in such a tight-knit community would love each other. After centuries with only a select few who carry the same secret as you…”

“They hold hands and touch _all the time_!”

“Modern mores are different from ancient ones,” Copley reasoned. “Even today, in different parts of the world, it isn’t unusual at all for men to hold hands and be physically affectionate with each other without it being romantic. Especially Northern Africa…”

“Anti-miscegenation laws,” Nicky suddenly said, staring at Copley. “We spoke about them, together. About how Joe and I could never let such an injustice go.”

A complex series of emotions played across Copley’s face as many things seemed to click into place at once for him. “I didn’t realize it was so personal for you,” he admitted. “I just thought…” he spread his hands helplessly. “It was an injustice.”

“Of course,” Nicky replied. “We fight any injustices, whether or not we have a personal stake. But those. Those were always personal.”

“I didn’t understand you clearly,” Copley apologized.

Joe snapped his fingers. “That is why you always asked where the other was. If it was a picture of me by myself, or Nicky by himself: I never understand why you would ask, or I supposed you were just being thorough.”

“Ah,” Copley said. “You were always together. _You_ two.”

Joe glanced at Nicky, and Nicky gazed back. He knew he was thinking through the same memories: the few times they’d been forced to spend time apart, for the greater good, for this mission or that, to help these people or those. But it was never for long—barely for days, at most weeks, never months.

“Always when it counts,” Nicky replied for them. He nodded at Copley. “I’m sorry we didn’t realize you didn’t know. That should help your research, yes? If Joe is there, I am there, or not far away. If I am there, Joe is there.”

“We could probably list the exceptions for you on both hands,” Joe added. Then he frowned. “We told you this.”

“I didn’t realize you were speaking specifically about yourself and Nicky,” Copley admitted. “There was plenty of evidence of you—all of you, that is—being separated at various times. I… assumed you were being poetic.”

“I _am_ known for my poetry,” Joe grinned.

Nile waved a hand at them. “ _How could you not know_?! They flirt _all the time_. Look at them!”

Joe and Nicky stood there as Copley awkwardly stared at them, at Nile’s direction.

“We _just_ talked about this!” Nile pointed out. “When I found out we couldn’t have kids! I asked Joe and Nicky if they could have kids if they had sex with anyone _else_.”

“I just assumed you meant… anyone at all,” Copley said.

“You thought we stayed celibate for our entire lives?” Andy snorted.

“Clearly doesn’t know you at _all_ ,” Joe teased.

“Well, I…” Copley sputtered. “I presumed if you were…” he gestured at Andy. “You would… Could keep track… but if they…” he gestured at Joe and Nicky. “Contraceptive practices were harder to… with men… with women, it’s… I just thought…”

“We make love,” Nicky said, incredulously.

Copley placed his head in his hands. “Yes. I know that. Now.”

“Gotta say, I’m disappointed, Copley,” Joe scolded him. “For a man of your observational prowess I would have thought a love as blinding and obvious as mine and Nicky’s would have shown through.”

Copley grimaced at Joe, clearly accepting his fate of being roasted about this for the foreseeable future.

“Frankly, your sex lives are none of my concern, _extant_ , until it leaves some evidence behind I need to take care of.”

Andy pushed off from the desk and put her hands on her hips. “Got it. Leave no survivors,” she deadpanned.

That at least got Nile cackling, and a find sigh and a half-smile from Copley. Joe threw one last longing look over his shoulder at Copley’s computer. It _was_ too bad they couldn’t keep a copy of their video. But they were used to losing all physical keepsakes of their lives to the steady erosion of time. And better yet, Joe still had the one thing that mattered to him from that video living and breathing in glorious three dimensions by his side.

* * *

_Notebook: Nicolo di Genova’s face, Nicolo di Genova’s hands, Nicolo di Genova’s eyes[…]_

The light was hitting Nicky beautifully this evening: dramatic and slanted, casting the hills and valleys of his shoulder muscles, his spine, his ass into beautiful, sharp relief. Joe’s charcoal pencil flew over the paper as he tried to translate such beauty from three dimensions into two, to capture even one facet of his living, breathing beauty into still life.

“The stone edging was so nice on that house we saw the other day,” Nicky was saying.

“We could get some and outline the garden. But you’ll have to dig up the front of it if you want to have room.”

“I was thinking of digging up a new garden, on the other side,” Nicky countered. “In front of the azalea bushes?”

“That would be good,” Joe hummed. “It’s the only spot that’s still that terrible lawn.”

“Sì, that is why I was thinking of it.”

“We can do that. Do you know what you want to put in?”

“I was thinking jasmine, for groundcover,” Nicky mused. “I hadn’t thought more than that.”

“I could pick some things,” Joe offered. He examined the light on Nicky’s body. “Can you move closer to me, love?”

Nicky scooted forward on the bed, angling his naked body carefully to catch the light just so, casting his body in the most dramatic shadows. Joe watched him, then after a moment stood up and crossed to the bed. With gentle touches he moved Nicky’s leg here, and his arm there, until he had the proportion of light and shadow he wanted. Then of course he leaned over and pressed a kiss to Nicky’s lips in thanks, before returning to his chair next to the bed.

“I liked those flat stones,” Nicky commented.

“I know,” Joe reassured him. “If you don’t get your fill of them in the garden, we could build a miniature garden up at the mailbox. Did you notice that, the cottage down the road…”

“Oh, yes. I loved that.”

“We can do both.”

Nicky hummed happily, wiggling his body just a little before settling back into the pose Joe had so carefully positioned him into.

After another fifteen minutes the light was gone and Joe tossed his sketchbook aside, kicking off his boxers to crawl naked into bed alongside Nicky. They kissed languidly—not about to start anything, because they needed to clean up and start thinking about dinner now, but just to feel each other’s touch in a moment of tranquility.

“Careful of that sketchbook,” Nicky said against Joe’s lips. Joe pulled back and frowned. When he saw the glimmer in Nicky’s eye he chuckled softly.

“What?”

“If James finds out about it, he’s liable to burn it.”

Joe barked out a laugh at that, hugging Nicky close.

“Ah, well: what Mr. Copley knows can’t hurt him.”

Nicky wiggled back, raising an eyebrow at Joe. “So should we make another sex video? The cameras now are much better.”

That sent them into a fit of giggles, wrestling and collapsing against each other on their bed as the sunset gave way to starlight and the city came alive around them.

**Author's Note:**

> Giotanner has a fabulous piece of art that inspired this whole fic in the first place, which you can see [here](https://giotanner.tumblr.com/post/636506294147334144/yusuf-al-kaysani-and-nicol%C3%B2-di-genova-the-old#notes).
> 
> And I used Wingodex's [fantastic corkboard sourcing post](https://wingodex.tumblr.com/post/645498969243484160/sourcing-copleys-sociogram) to fill in the gaps of some of Copley's photos/materials as I was writing.


End file.
